September 11th terrorism has introduced Australian baby boomers to the uneasiness of war. Our isolation, our economy, our open spaces and our openhearted attitude to broken people no longer insulate us. Yet Australian Christians have an opportunity to give a creative and relevant lead as we discover how to radiate the light of Jesus’ truth and the salt of his love through our local communities and the wider world.

Unlike Europeans, we have never experienced total war, though World War Two came as close as the Kokoda Trail, the Coral Sea battle, mini-submarines in Sydney Harbour and over 200 Japanese bombing raids stretching from Broome to the north coast of Queensland.

Rather than initiating or inflaming threats, our military history stems from response to it, with our security being based originally from being part of the world’s biggest-ever Empire, and more lately through ANZUS.

Our conscious roots have remained white and British, despite the range of nationalities aboard the First Fleet. The 1850′s Gold Rush was our first flood of other races, which later began – as our gold dwindled – to weld into a federation that was still strongly loyal to Britain.

The nineteen fifties and sixties released a pragmatic kind of reconciliation through post-war development: major projects like the Snowy Mountains and Ord River Schemes, and the Pilbara’s vast mineral wealth attracting people from everywhere. Former enemies have cooperated in building their personal futures and a stronger, more confident Australia.

Today multiculturalism has diverted our emotional and military reliance from an England that is now much weaker, towards the USA; larger, but with a similarly mixed racial background. And despite strident calls from disparate (despairate?) groups like (Und)One Nation, our inter-racial harmony has only ever required one generation to emerge.

My concern is that Australia is still undeveloped, making us far more internationally pliable than we need to be, and we have no major national projects underway. Standardising our rail network, or harnessing monsoonal rains to sustain a string of northwestern coastal cities that will boost our trade, relieve the urban pressures in Melbourne and Sydney and give us a cultural interaction that is personally- rather than academically-derived. The field is wide open for visionary leadership to create a healthy balance for multiculturalism by giving new arrivals more reason to let go centuries of imported distrust of other racial groups and embrace a completely new start here.

We are among the most politically stable of nations, with the freedom to criticise, change or keep governments by ballots rather than bullets. Isolation and a small population deny us a major economic, political or military role, but we are world leaders in sports success (per capita), in our capacity to invent or adapt, to engineer and in medical and scientific research.

Australian Christians need to focus on gratitude to God rather than on analysis paralysis; on cynical criticism; or on pursuing the latest jargon to add to our vocabularies. Then we may see more ways to give the rest of the world a fresh new lead. We could start by expressing our ethos of giving people a fair go, which is so close to the heart of the gospel. A fair go also happily recognises the success of those who develop their ideas to enable others to find new careers and jobs.

The recent edited transcript of Gore Vidal’s interview regarding the mind of the terrorist promised more than it delivered. I was hoping for insights into the double deprivation caused by a force-fed diet of hatred: infants losing any chance of childhood and adults foregoing the opportunity of a mature world-view. The transcript’s editor gave Vidal carte blanche to demonise his opponents, exactly what he accuses the US political system of doing. And I’m puzzled that the FBI can have no restraint while being controlled by the US Dept of Justice.

Defining a mass-murderer like Timothy McVeigh as some kind of hero may be a plausible plot for his next novel, but it offers us no redemptive insights. It is also an insult to the agony of those who have been traumatised by the reptilian cowardice that picks defenceless victims to prove very little. To hear an expert wordsmith vacuously wonder how his choice of words has been misunderstood in the face of inevitable and justifiable anger could make us wonder how out of touch he could be with ordinary people. Those of us who have spent time with prisoners or psychopaths can find their often calm, plausible demeanour impossible to reconcile with the actions that have led to their being put away. We can’t afford to be blinded by the deceitful way in which evil uses noble intentions to camouflage its painful results.

Like many, I am dismayed at the extravagant aspects of American life: its consumption, its apparent compulsion to arm every citizen, and the civil(?)

violence that regularly erupts into our news media. But CNN, Hollywood and Madison Avenue rarely present Americans’ amazing levels of generosity and hospitality, and their capacity to aim for and realise big ideas. They just think bigger than we do, which is great if they are open to God. But if our criminals were up against the same capacity for big thinking that their US counterparts embody, they would be off home to mum and looking for their teddy bears in no time.

I am also dismayed about armaments industries that prey so effectively on the egos and fears of corrupt regimes and maniacal warlords. The diabolical mixture of technology and tyranny produce a pincer movement that debars ordinary people from cropping, grazing or developing businesses and industries that lead to economic freedom and the confidence to hand something on to their grandchildren. But let’s also recognise that the USA is only one player – albeit a very large one – in this lucrative, deadly trade, for well-respected companies in Britain, France, Italy, Russia and many other countries are also deeply involved.

Returning to Vidal and his selective analysis of Roosevelt’s “goading” of Japan before Pearl Harbour. Few who fought – or lost relatives who fought – the Japanese could accept his view, especially if they experienced the suicidal mindset of ‘divine wind’ Kamikaze (embryonic Sept 11?) pilots or the barbarous brutality of the Bushido code that so chillingly ruled life and death in concentration camps.

Throughout the thirties, the Japanese in China and Korea were not “generally misbehaving,” as Vidal blandly describes. This was no time of calmly outbidding the locals at house and land auctions or having loud parties. It was during this time that they perfected their systematic atrocities, murder and subjugation, preparing for a one hundred-year war against the west. They eventually lost the first four years, but their economy now runs at number two and they have no Christian heritage to challenge the ethics of their future direction in the same manner as we can openly express in our society.

Vidal needs to recognise the possibility that the Allied forces were, as he attributes to McVeigh, also bringing retribution to bear on an inhuman, amoral military system. It is not far-fetched to say that, had the US not stepped in – however reluctantly – to challenge the Japanese advance in 1941, our protests today (if we were free to make them) might have to be in primitive Japanese or German!

I am not anti-Japan. This is part of the rest of the story. Japanese historians are still sadly unable or unwilling to include the full record of the Second World War in school textbooks, so preventing generations of youth from coming to grips with the pain of their own past. Could this inscrutable denial be a key spiritual factor in the huge suicide statistics among their young people – despite their post-war economic miracle – and in the hard, rocky ground that has stifled the response to the gospel and any significant growth of the church?

But the stench of death has neither western nor eastern origins; it is deeply rooted in all cultures. Our political awareness must avoid spiritualised cynicism or half-baked “prophetic statements” that simply vent our spleen, for we need to keep our focus on redemptive grace. Biblical prophets thundered their warnings or judgements, but each one expressed God’ s heartache and desire for restoration and blessing for anyone who would respond.

Political solutions that only rely on human wisdom or cunning will always be incomplete, which is why we should pray for all those in authority. It may be a truism, but we rarely criticise those we pray for, and we rarely pray for those we criticise, as we explore God’s view of the scenario.

God is not an Anglo-Saxon and evangelism is not an American invention. We are no better than other races, but we are surely better off, and our freedom is a magnet for many people from all over the world. We owe it to ourselves to be more receptive to God’s Spirit, so our freedom may exude openhearted gratitude. Then sensitive Christian leadership may also be aligned with our success in sports, science and medical research.

We are free to blame or to bless. Let’s choose to keep blessing, and building peace instead of merely wishing for it or decrying its absence, so God has the most room to burst his light out of the darkness that enslaves people all around us.

This is our charter and our privilege. It has to be our choice.

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